Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian author of ten books who has been called "our greatest living aphorist." His prose and poetry meditations have gone viral, are used in classrooms and religious services, and feature in international film festivals.
Lababidi's latest work includes "Revolutions of the Heart" (Wipf and Stock, 2020), a collection of essays and conversations exploring crises and transformation, and "Learning to Pray" (Kelsay Books, 2021), a book of new and selected spiritual aphorisms and poems. Osama Esber is a Syrian poet, photographer and translator based in the United States of America. He recently published two poetry collections by Dar5otot Publishing House in Amman, Jordan; the first is entitled "On my Sea Routes" (2020) and the second, "On the Bank of the River of Things" (2021). He has translated many books from English into Arabic for a selection of Western poets, writers and thinkers. Esber is also co-editor of the Arabic section of Jadaliyya and co-host of the monthly audio podcast Status, which combines hard-hitting interviews/conversations, on-the-scene reports, reviews, informed commentary, and readings on the Arab world and the Middle East. Zakaria Wakrim was born in 1988 and currently lives and works between Spain and Morocco. "The aim of photographs is to impart a deep and fundamental understanding of the desert's ability to spur the type of introspection and enlightenment that writers like Saint-Exupéry wrote about with such passion." (zakariawakrim.com)
Photographs in this chapbook are from Wakrim's "Amarg" series, the Amazigh (Berber) word for nostalgia, also used to signify a hybrid form of musical poetry found in Southern Morocco.